FEZ

Polytron Corporation - 2012 - PC/X360

I was so excited to play this game. I preordered it on Steam and played it for hours the day it came out. FEZ is an indie platformer with puzzle solving elements, a retro feel and an emphasis on art style and music. All stuff that I love. But after about the first hour or two, this game’s charm wore off pretty quickly for me. After completing one “world”, FEZ redirects you to kind of a “hub world” where you can explore new pathways that link to other worlds. The problem is after I explored enough pathways, I had to tread back through worlds I’d already been through in order to try to find new pathways. Which is really not that much fun; to repeat sections of a level you've already done two or three times already.

FEZ’s main puzzle solving mechanic is based on the fact that you’re viewing your character in a 2d plane, but you can rotate the camera 90 degrees around your character to reveal that the world actually exists in 3d space. This mechanic had been done before in Super Paper Mario for the Wii, a game I found to be equally disappointing, but I digress. After solving a handful of FEZ’s perspective puzzles, the novelty wore off and all of the puzzles felt same-y. I found it to be just a matter of rotating the camera around and around until I saw a platform or whatever it was that let me get where I was trying to go.

Summary:
I admit that I didn't finish this game, and I hear there’s some cool stuff it does near the end. I’d like to try to go back and finish it, but it seems more like work than fun to me.